The candidates for mayor of St. Paul are the incumbent, Chris Coleman, the always-available Sharon Anderson, Tim Holden and Kurt (Dirty Kurty) Dornfeld, a city streets maintenance worker who lists among his pledges “managing government so well that people will want to come to work.” He would seem to have the inside observation that people are not now coming to work.

God help us.

With the exception of Anderson, whose last name alone confuses enough voters to throw her a check mark, the campaigns of Holden and Dornfeld are beyond grassroots. They are so grassroots that they are like the grass at the State Fair, which gets worn down to dirt on the first day.

Holden, for example, a St. Thomas Academy and St. Cloud State graduate, is a 44-year-old real estate investor and Realtor who operates his campaign out of the back of a building he owns at University and Snelling avenues. In the event he gets within sprinting distance of the incumbent, it most certainly will get pointed out that Holden’s tenant in the front of the building operates a business called the Love Doctor, an adult entertainment store.

“Well,” Holden said the other day, “it’s a legal business, good tenant, pays his bills and his taxes.”

And, Holden would point out, the Love Doctor was no different from scores of other businesses that were disrupted by the construction of the Central Corridor light-rail line, the final straw that compelled Holden to throw his hat into the ring.

“What is your background?” Holden was asked the other day.

“Hard work,” Holden said.

By which he meant that he has been self-employed for 20 years, not only as a Realtor, but with a business called Added Value Improvement and his rental properties. He insists that the city has poverty issues, that the city is not welcoming enough or accommodating enough to business and that those citizens of the city dependent on the government to take care of them must understand that the money will run out without an infusion of private capital.

The message is sound, but Holden is having trouble getting traction. He has people standing on street corners holding his signs, and he had a booth at the Fair.

“We work all the parades and festivals,” Holden’s guy, Bob Bohland, said.

Holden was in his office with his operatives, Bohland, a former Realtor who is now Holden’s campaign manager, and Pam Jackson, an event planner, who, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to have any events to plan. They have signs and buttons and slogans and mailings and some great thoughts about the condition of the city, but they are discovering that running is easier said than done.

“The mayor won’t debate us,” Holden said. “We call or email his office, and we have been told to stop bothering them. We call and leave messages, but we don’t get return calls.”

Well, there is something to the idea that the mayor either does not need to debate Holden or does not want to.

“My office is not the place for setting up a debate,” Coleman said. “He’s got to do what any candidate has to do. He has to campaign. We have a debate scheduled in October, and maybe we will have more than one, but my office isn’t the place for setting up debates.”

Fair enough, which brings the contenders back to the harsh reality of trying to gain name recognition after having flown so long under the radar. Holden, an independent, has never held political office. Dirty Kurty, who takes his name from his job of skimming asphalt, hasn’t held office. Anderson, who has occasionally flown above the radar — she lost to Skip Humphrey in the 1994 state attorney general race — is sometimes seen on the screen as a UFO.

The contenders have less than two months. They have to do something. There are no words to describe how secure Coleman must feel. Holden said he might resort to riding a flatbed truck around town with a bullhorn.

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